BlazeVOX an.online.journal.of.voice
Presenting fine works of poetry, fiction, text art, visual poetry and arresting works of creative non-fiction written by authors from around world
BlazeVOX13 Fall 2013
Table of Contents
Poetry
Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction
Clarissa Grunwald | Elysium
Benjamin Rader | An Evening Special | Lucid Phrases
Allison Talucci | Apology
Elizabeth Alexander | Transpositions
Kailyn McCord | Transcript #2951
Sheikh Saaliq | The ‘Hanging’
Tariq Shah | Felix and Pauly
Joan Fiset | White Streak
M. E. McMullen | Desperate Horseflies
Megan Schikora | The Paris Problem
Jennifer Lesh | The Vineyard
Rudy Ravindra | Pandora’s Box
Sonia Saraiya | West Indies
Derek J. Douglas | Anchors Aweigh
Danielle Brawand | The Toe Sucker
Acta Biographia - Author Bios
BXtraordinary
15 Questions | Interviews with BlazeVOX Authors
An interview with Larry Sawyer
An interview with Krystal Languell
An interview with Burt Kimmelman
An interview with Barbara Henning
An Interview with Wade Stevenson
Wednesday's Poem
Hello and welcome to the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 13. Presented here is a world-class issue featuring poetry, art, fiction, and an arresting work of creative non-fiction, written by authors from around globe.
Fall Matters: We are pleased to present our regular journal issue and we are pleased to announce our new BXtraordinary section to the BlazeVOX web site. Our journal features 34 poets and 15 prose writers presenting some spectacular work. Our BXtraordinary section has sixteen Video Poems and eight interviews. The video poems consist of two full-length poetry readings from around the Buffalo poetry scene and our Wednesday's Poem series. In these short video readings, poets read from their BlazeVOX book. We have also gathered up our Friday series, 15 Questions into this issue. In this issue we have eight interviews consisting of fifteen questions with BlazeVOX writers. This is a wonderful way to bridge readers and writers and hopefully open a connection. Tune in each Friday and Wednesday for new installments of our interviews and video poems. We plan to keep on adding in new and interesting content on a weekly basis, so hurray!
WORD FOR WORD POETRY PRESENTS:
BlazeVOX BOOKS
Bryant Park Poetry Reading
I am very excited to make an announcement for a big BlazeVOX [books] poetry reading in NYC. The Word for Word programs takes place under a canopy of London Plane trees in Bryant Park. Bryant Park is located at Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) and 42nd Street. The visual landmark at the east end of the park is the New York Public Library. The poetry readings take place on Tuesdays at 7pm. We will feature five poets, Michael Kelleher, Amy King, Kristina Marie Darling, Leah Umansky and Geoffrey Gatza. Each poet will read for 15 to 20 minutes.
In case of heavy rain we will move to their rain venue, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, 20 West 44th Street. It’s a couple of blocks away from the park but we move together as a group so no one gets lost. After the reading we move the group to the Bryant Park Café for refreshments and a post mortem of the reading.
We have an exciting event coming up in a few days. BlazeVOX is having a reading at the Word for Word series held at Bryant Park. This is the park that is right behind the New York Public Library, the one with those two glorious lion sculptures facing out to 5th Avenue right near 42nd street. The idea of being a poet and a book publisher blossomed right here in Bryant Park when I was a young chef. I was working furious hours for very little, or often, no money. I learned a great many things about life during that time. I also learned many things that have nothing to do with life, items like frittatas or fish sauces that are not in fashion anymore. But when I wanted to find peace and quite by loosing myself in literature, I went to Bryant Park and the library. It was the only place in the whole city where I felt I could think clearly. Rather than hiding in my book on the train, my closet that was listed as an apartment, or mingling in overly crowded coffee shops, which were very much in vogue in those days. When I left NYC to go to back home to Buffalo eighteen years ago I had every intention of returning. As things work out, Buffalo treated me all right. So this reading is a nice way to come back and show the land, the trees and the old guys playing chess the seeds that Bryant Park planted within me and grew. With that in mind, if you are in NYC please come out and play a game of chess, listen to fine poetry and have a drink with us :-) If not, no worries, I will be recording all the performances and broadcasting them in our BXtraordinary page in the coming weeks. Hurray!
7:00pm – 8:30pm | Bryant Park Reading Room
Featuring the Poets of: BlazeVOX Books
Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 7:00pm - 8:30pm at Bryant Park
Join the Event on Facebook | www.bryantpark.org
Michael Kelleher
Leah Umansky
Amy King
Slaves to Do These Things | I’m the Man Who Loves You | Antidotes for an Alibi
Kristina Marie Darling
Petrarchan | THE MOON & OTHER INVENTIONS: Poems After Joseph Cornell
Geoffrey Gatza
House of Forgetting | Apollo (Forthcoming)
IntroductionIntroduction
In this issue we seek to avoid answers but rather to ask questions. With a subtle minimalistic approach, this issue of BlazeVOX focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting. The works collected feature coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections, which make it possible to revise literary history and, even, better, to complement it.
Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies these piece appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, the texts reference post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Many of the works are about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes develop in absurd ways. By creating situations and breaking the passivity of the spectator, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. These pieces demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Enjoy!
Rockets! Geoffrey Gatza, editor